Does embarrassment affect professional athletes? Not the season-long struggle kind of embarrassment where you go to work knowing your coworkers aren’t putting forth their best effort. The single instance kind where you do something atrocious and have to live with the emotional consequences forevermore. On Wednesday night, today’s New Orleans Pelicans’ opponent did exactly.
You see, the Portland Trailblazers on Wednesday allowed Kevin Love to score 34 points on them in the first quarter of a blowout loss. Ouch. He broke the NBA record for points scored in a first quarter, and neared Klay Thompson‘s mark from a third quarter last season that had already felt like an insurmountable number at 37.